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February’s fantastic funding frenzy

By Ian Lowe examines changes to the annual ritual of grant applications

AAAAH, February…Valentine’s Day and the mad rush by university researchers
to submit applications to the Australian Research Council for funding. Don’t
you love them both? This year the funding process has been made more frantic
than ever by government guidelines linking success in attracting research
grants to pay outs for improving infrastructure. That puts added pressure on
both the university and the researcher.

Not surprisingly, each university is trying to play the system. Senior
officers have been charged with responsibility for increasing the number of
applications for funding. Workshops are being held to teach staff to write
more convincing proposals.

One university even devised an incentive scheme, with extra research funds for
those who applied for external grants. The ploy doubled the number of
applications. The worry is whether all this frenetic activity is doing
anything to improve the quality of research. Or is enormous effort being
expended simply on redistributing a constant amount of research support?

The application season has also revealed tensions between different research
interests. The engineering profession, through the Institution of Engineers
Australia, has launched a campaign for a fixed share of the resources
allocated by the ARC. We are talking about big money. The engineers have put
in an ambit bid for more than 35 per cent of the ARC funds – a cool
A&dollar;40 million, in other words. The system is biased in favour of pure
science, they claim.

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But the funding business is not so clear cut. There is no algorithm to
determine how research funds should be divided between areas. Who’s to say the
engineers should receive more than a third of the funding pie? Perhaps the
percentage engineers receive now – about 20 per cent of ARC grants – is a fair
reflection of standards. Certainly, industry has been claiming for years that
engineers in academe don’t produce the type of research that is very useful.
Can more money be justified? The chair of the ARC, Max Brennan, has written
that the engineers’ case is based on “a number of unsubstantiated assertions
and flawed international comparisons”.

Of course, the engineers would like to bypass the ARC altogether. They would
like a separate engineering research council. Education researchers tried a
similar move a few years ago but failed. The only group to have succeeded in
getting privileged access to funds are the medical researchers.

In the final analysis, whether the engineers’ campaign succeeds will be a
political question. The responsible minister, Simon Crean, is committed to
applying new knowledge to make industry more competitive. If the ARC is to
fight off the move by the engineers to corral some of the funds, it may need
to convince Crean it is doing a good job of cultivating applied research.

ALTHOUGH centralised power does not make much sense for a country which
consists of over 13 000 islands, the power-brokers and travelling salesmen are
descending on Indonesia with offers too good to refuse. I recently received a
brochure describing a conference in Jakarta on Private Sector Power which
would help me “understand Indonesia’s US&dollar;30 billion power market”. If I
attend, I’m told I will be able to rub shoulders with decision makers.

But what bothers me is that the speakers are largely from American companies,
with not an Indonesian national in sight.

By contrast, an invitation I received to a conference on geothermal power in
the Philippines lists many local speakers. I detect little attention in the
programme to the massive social and environmental impacts of building
geothermal power stations in rural areas.

I have a concern about both these conferences, as well as others that have been
drawn to my attention. I would like to see the good of the local people
feature more obviously on the agenda. Instead, the stress seems to be on the
chance for outside corporations to make a financial killing.

I WAS delighted to hear that the 1994 Young Australian of the Year was not an
athlete or a singer, but Tasmanian student Anna Bown. Bown won the individual
gold medal at last year’s Biology Olympiad in Holland. And she was also part
of the Australian team which won the silver medal. It is a pleasant change to
see intellectual achievement in science by a young woman being rewarded in
this way.

AN ESSAY competition has been launched in Sydney to make science students more
aware of ozone depletion. It’s for year 12 students, with six expenses-paid
trips to American laboratories as the prize. The students have to concentrate
on one area of science. There are standard choices, such as biology or
chemistry. But one of the options given is meterology – the science of
measurement perhaps?

The advertisement I saw said that further details can be obtained from the
Sydney Foundation for Phuscis, a branch of science too exotic for either me or
the spell-checker to hazard a guess as to its origin.